1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an input module, and more particularly to an encoding module applied to a computer input device.
2. Related Art
With the development and progress of science, a personal computer (PC), a notebook computer, or other computer devices have become an indispensable tool for the mass in daily life or work. However, the computer device must utilize a keyboard, a mouse, or other computer peripherals to execute various functions.
Taking the mouse for an example, recently, it has been widely used to manipulate window interfaces of the computer device, and has become one of the closely related peripheral hardware. In order to enable a user to quickly scroll a display image of the window, a rolling wheel is designed on the mouse, such that the user can directly scroll the window image, and it is not necessary to shift a mouse cursor to a scroll bar on a side edge of the window image, and then scroll the image up and down by using the button of the mouse.
A conventional rolling wheel has a spindle passing through a central position thereof, and may be assembled on a supporting frame in a rolling manner with the spindle as an axle center. An encoder is electrically disposed on a circuit board, and one end of the spindle facing the encoder is combined with the encoder. The user rotates the rolling wheel and drives the spindle to rotate together, so that the encoder is made to generate a control signal to the computer device, thereby controlling the motion of scrolling the page up and down.
Considering the conventional manner of combining the encoder with the spindle of the rolling wheel, for example, in an encoder configuration provided by the Taiwan Patent No. 420330, a hexagonal hole-shaped bearing is disposed on the encoder, and one end of the spindle is designed into a convex hexagonal shape matching with the bearing. When the rolling wheel and the encoder are combined, firstly, the spindle and the bearing of the encoder are made to be located on the same axle center, and then the rolling wheel is horizontally moved towards the direction of the encoder, such that the spindle is inserted into the bearing, thereby finishing the assembling process.
In the above manner of combining the encoder with the spindle, the rolling wheel and the encoder are combined in the horizontal direction. Due to the limitation of the assembling direction, during the process of assembling the mouse device, it is necessary to manually assemble the rolling wheel with the encoder, which cannot be achieved by an automatic device. It takes operators on the production line quite a lot of time to align the spindle with the bearing on the same axle center, such that the production efficiency cannot be further improved. If a certain careless mistake occurs, the spindle may be easily damaged, so as to reduce the rotating service life of the scroll wheel.
In addition, when the rolling wheel of the convention mouse is operated, the spindle of the rolling wheel bears a stress generated by the repeated rotations of the rolling wheel. After the mouse has been used for a long time, the structural strength of the spindle cannot bear the repeated stress any more, and as a result, the spindle structure is deformed or even damaged.